My name is Stephen Boyer! I’m a librarian at the People’s Library, I moved in full-time a couple weeks ago. I’ve been insanely busy getting the Occupy Wall St. Poetry Anthology off the ground and the WiFi here has been down, but now the WiFi is up and the anthology has reached a stable place so hopefully I’ll be able to start updating the blog regularly to fill in the readership as to the going-ons of what I’m doing at The People’s Library.

The OWS Poetry Anthology is currently only available at The People’s Library. Eventually it’ll be mass produced and probably online but for now I feel it’s imperative that it lives solely in the library. This way it maintains a power and an aura that will be lost once it is more widely available. And the feedback has been immense! If you haven’t had the chance to come down and read it, just imagine reading pages and pages and pages of voices of dissent as thousands occupy the space surrounding you. The anthology was born out of the poetry assembly. Every Friday night around 9:30pm poets of all walks of life and ages come in and read/perform their poetry. Folks that have been around the NYC poetry scene for a long time have been saying the poetry assembly is one of the greatest open mic reading series NYC has ever fostered and NYC has a great legacy of poetry. With that validation, I highly suggest you join us. Poetry illuminates the soul of Occupy Wall St. A lot of people are asking, “What are the demands” and the poets voices show just how nuanced the human spirit and impossible a set of demands truly is. This occupation is about transforming consciousness and the poetry community is a major part of that process. So please join us!

The anthology is open to all people and all poems. Obviously there are a lot of political poems landing in the anthology but its imperative we include all aspects of the human experience. Famous poets have included their work (Anne Waldman, Adrienne Rich, Michael McClure, and more), the Allen Ginsberg Society has sent us a poem on behalf of Allen, children have included their work, people of all walks of life have included your work. Again, all work is accepted and you can send your own poems to STEPHENJBOYER@GMAIL dot COM. Please include “Occupy Poetry” in the subject as my inbox has been flooded! But I love it! I want the anthology to get so large that it fills the entirety of Wall St.

Besides living in the library I’ve also helped start the Queer Caucus and I also blog at minorprogression where you can learn a lot more about me.

22 responses to “Occupy Wall St. Poetry Update”

In my opinion, 5 gallons is an ideal quantity to start with.
She even warns her father that if he doesn’t rein them in now, Lydia will “be the most determined flirt that ever made herself and her family ridiculous. Now, add the mixture into a cup of carrot juice and mix the liquid completely.

I have often used poetry to express passionate views i strongly believed the listeners should allow into their minds, or at least take something away from the spoken words. It feels great to see so many beautiful words and interpretations addressing an ugly situation. Thank you to all the poets, occupy wall street, and all their supports supporting in different fashions and functions this is truly a beauty to speak to the world through art.

please check out this 6 and a half minute poetry compilation made by the R.A.W. Poets who visited Zuccotti Park and intend on assembling to educated and raise awareness through poetry. (all footage taken in zuccotti park & time square)

This reminds me of, “Poets Against the War”; the anthology which came out just a little after war was declared on Iraq in March 2003.
I can’t wait to see OWS Poetry Anthology online . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if people all the way from Alaska to Florida become inspired. Good luck! 3 Cheers for the Poets!

Occupy Wall Street and the Loop and the Financial District and the City of London and the Bandra Kurla and the Paseo de la Reforma and the Nihombashi and the Pudong and the Bankenviertel and the Paradeplatz and every other ganglion of the parasite clamped with its million hooked lips over the aching skull of the world

Occupy Tahrir Square and the Puerta del Sol and the Piazza di Spagna and Liberty Square and Trafalgar Square and the Place de la Concorde and the Akropolis and Red Square and Alexanderplatz and Tiananmen Square and Ogawa Plaza and every other place where just popular government’s parchment promissory note has crumbled and expired
Occupy capitols and parliaments and palaces and national assemblies and all their cupolas and halls and corridors and expel the designer pimps of profit and pollution and cover cold marble symmetries with hilarious hand-lettered shouts and outrage banners and warm loud angry imperfect bodies of democracy

Occupy the offices of bankers and landlords and hedge fund managers and the offices of the CEOs of global retail chains and mining corporations and oil companies and arms manufacturers Occupy their networks to uproot their file systems decrypt their secrets Occupy their publicity and power-wash their corporate faces to reveal the rotting flesh Turn their quarterly reports into collapsing towers of zeros

Occupy the net and the web and the social media and the blogosphere and the infosphere and all the other virtual villages and suburbs and malls Make all Power’s secret cities into naked cities all its invisible cities into visible cities Occupy all the hidden cities and forbidden cities and public squares and gated communities of the communiverse

Occupy the public parks and the public lands and the sliced and shrunken wilderness against the belching backhoes and graders Occupy the public schools against the soft-spoken reasonable graders and backhoes of fake equality leveling minds like the tops of small wild mountains Occupy the public universities and chop off the money tendrils of parasitic partnership crawling through labs and research centers

Occupy the factories hells of boredom and injury teach the robot cutters assemblers presses new dances for making new rhythms for need met with utility and grace Occupy the fields industrial carpeting of chlorophyll machines in sterile gray nutrient and give the old nutritious cruciforms and grasses back their alliances their intermingling in live dirt as intricate as skin

Occupy language as it scrolls and crawls and winks Power’s festering poetry in shiny pixels and screen-head voices all around you Clean it with brisk brooms of incredulous irony and wire brushes of collective scorn Occupy language and above all wash it with our imaginative tears for all the misery and death it has been tortured and neutered into concealing

Occupy the seven parts of speech and the rhythms of long and short phonemes along the trail of the sentence winding or straight Occupy hypotaxis and conjunctions to build a commonwealth of words where beauty clarity and purpose move again together in one body electric like blood its red sign and figurations its nerves and syntax its conjointed bones

Occupy your bones and stand them up like tent poles for your sweaty skin Occupy your blood so it circulates the iron-tasting oxygen of truth Occupy your nerves so they carry news of the soiled wind and the stolen ground and the ragged multiplying multicolored banners of solidarity Occupy your hands and close them on other hands to know them and bear them up bear them up bear them up

A nation that does not invite rebellion among her poets has already destroyed them. I swear that every tree is top secret, green with shady clues That will inevitably suggest a subversive line of inquiry. No, there is never a society that is doomed before its poets choose to accept doom. – Eveline Bates (1964)

Why hello, Lawrence Ferlinghetti! You can send it along to stephenjboyer AT gmail DOT com with OCCUPY POETRY as the subject line.
Thanks for contributing–we look forward to reading it! and if you’ve got any extra books hanging around City Lights, we’d be happy to take those off your hands too.

Our mailing address, if you’re of a mind to ship us a little something, is
The UPS Store
Re: Occupy Wall Street
Attn: The People’s Library
118A Fulton St. #205
New York, NY 10038